ente.com/open is fully automated.
Publishing operating costs will create operational overhead, since we've to manually consolidate, label and publish expense records. Not excited about doing that right now, but would like to in the future.
Currently we've runway for a few years, and a margin of ~70% – entirety of which is reinvested into building Ente.
If your margins are about 70%, do you have any plans to reduce your prices? Compared to other photo storage platforms, your pricing seems a lot higher. End to end encryption seems to be the only USP when a person looks at your hosted offering.
70% is our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...).
We have to reduce our prices, to make Ente's products accessible to a wider audience. But right now the focus is on building a sustainable business and increasing the probability of this business outliving us.
70% is not unreasonable gross margin. What makes you think that’s a reason to ask that they lower prices? That 70% has to cover a lot of expenses.
GP here. The initial comment did not say that it was the gross margin. Only a follow up reply to my comment asking about the price reduction did. So I assumed it was net margin.
That’s not the only unique selling point.
It’s a very refined and feature-complete product with e2ee. Many alternatives just don’t have feature parity…Ente has been of the few alternative apps where you can say “it has everything important Google/Apple Photos has.”
It has desktop apps, which a number of alternatives don’t have.
It has automated continuous plain-directory export for making your 3-2-1 backup that uses different media.
The high pricing is just something I would expect from someone who isn’t a giant tech company. There are very few companies who beat pricing from places like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
GP here. You make some valid points, but I was talking about the pricing of the hosted service by Ente because Ente allows self hosting too. Of course, the investment to support self hosting and to provide the apps (for free to anyone, including the self hosting crowd) matter in pricing decisions. But it still seems quite high to me.